Magento and Business Central: data flow in practice

Which data should be synchronised between Magento and Business Central?

When Magento has to talk to Business Central, it is tempting to say: “We will just synchronise everything.”

But hold on.

That is often where an otherwise good integration idea becomes unnecessarily complicated. The goal is not for two systems to be able to do exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. The goal is for the right data to land in the right place, without anyone having to type it in twice.

A good Magento Business Central integration makes it easier to manage the webshop, stock and finance. But it requires that you first agree on which data matters most, and which system owns it.

See how Connectify works with Magento and Business Central integrations.

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Start by deciding where the data lives

The most important question in the project is not a technical one:

Which system is the source of truth for each piece of data?

For many companies, Business Central is the place where item data, stock, prices, customer accounts and finance are kept together. Magento or Adobe Commerce, on the other hand, is where the customer meets the products, shops and forms their experience of the company.

That does not mean everything has to be controlled from Business Central. Magento can easily be the place where the e-commerce team works with campaigns, categories, product texts and content.

The point is simply that you have to make the choice deliberately. Otherwise two systems can quickly start overwriting each other. And then there is suddenly not much automation left in the automation.

Microsoft itself describes Business Central’s integrations as web service- and API-based solutions. Read the technical overview at Microsoft Learn if you want to dig deeper.

Products and variants

Products are often one of the first places where the integration has to go to work.

Typically the item number, name, barcode, dimensions, variants and sales units need to be available in Business Central. On the Magento side there is at the same time a need for images, descriptions, categories, SEO texts and related products.

So scope out, among other things:

• Are new items created in Business Central, Magento or a PIM system?
• Which fields is the webshop allowed to edit?
• How are size, colour and other variants handled?
• What happens when an item is discontinued?
• Should all items be shown in the webshop, or only a particular range?

If you have many products or several markets, a PIM system can be a good next step. Then each system can focus on what it does best. See Connectify’s integration platform for an overview of the systems that can be part of the architecture.

Stock status

Stock data is one of the things customers quickly notice if it does not work properly.

Nobody wants to order an item that turns out to be sold out. And your customer service does not want to spend Monday morning explaining why the stock status is wrong either.

The stock logic of the integration should take account of:

• Physical stock
• Reserved stock
• Several warehouses or shops
• Items on their way in
• Bundles and packaged solutions
• Any inventory management at a 3PL partner

Stock does not have to be updated in the same way as product texts. A new product might be transferred at fixed intervals, while the stock status needs to be updated far more often.

It depends on your business. If you sell a few expensive products, the need is one thing. If you sell thousands of items a day, the need is something else entirely.

Prices and customer-specific agreements

Prices sound simple. They rarely are.

In B2C it is often about ordinary sales prices, campaign prices and different currencies. In B2B it gets more interesting with customer-specific prices, discount agreements, volume discounts and different product ranges.

Here the integration needs to be able to answer:

• Which price should the customer see?
• Which customer group does the customer belong to?
• Should campaign prices come from Magento or Business Central?
• How are VAT, currency and rounding handled?
• What happens if a price agreement changes?

It is rarely the price itself that creates problems. It is the rules behind it.

Read also our guide to Magento B2B and Business Central if you work with customer-specific prices and several users per customer.

Orders, customers and deliveries

When the customer has placed an order, it obviously has to go on to Business Central. But an order is more than an order number.

A good order integration takes account of at least the customer details, delivery address, order lines, discounts, freight, VAT, payment status and any comments.

The same goes for customers. Should a new customer in Magento automatically be created as a customer account in Business Central? Or should a B2B customer first be approved and have a price agreement attached?

And the integration does not end just because the order has landed in the ERP system. The customer would also like to know whether the order has been dispatched, what tracking number it has, whether anything is on back order, and whether a refund has gone through.

The slightly more technical things that keep operations healthy

Ideally it should not be necessary to understand integration code in order to run a webshop. But there are some principles that are worth getting in place:

• An order must not be created twice if a system responds slowly.
• Failed transfers must be findable and re-runnable.
• Data fields must be documented, so everyone knows where the information comes from.
• There must be monitoring of errors, queues and missing synchronisations.
• You should be able to reconcile whether, for example, the number of orders and the stock levels actually match across the systems.

It may sound like small details. But they are the ones that determine whether the integration works when things get busy.

What should be synchronised in your setup?

The short answer is: whatever makes your everyday work easier and the customer experience better.

Before you start, you should get clarity on:

1. Which systems you have today.
2. Which data is most important for operations.
3. Which system owns which data.
4. What should happen when something fails.
5. Which processes you want to automate first.

When those things are in place, the integration is not just a technical exercise. It becomes a tool that gives you less manual work, fewer errors and a better basis for growth.

Do you have Magento or Adobe Commerce and Dynamics 365 Business Central? Read more about Connectify’s Magento integration or get in touch with us for a scoping of your data flow.